Predicting College Football Games

2024 Season Predictions

Author

Phil Henrickson

Published

September 22, 2024

This page displays predictions for upcoming games in the 2024 college football season. These predictions come from a model built on historical college football play by play and game data in order to simulate upcoming games. All data is from collegefootballdata.com. Any mistakes are my own.

Week 4 Predictions

The following table displays estimates and predictions for the upcoming week’s college football games.

Betting Lines

How do these predictions compare to betting lines? I compare my predicted spread against the opening spread from ESPN Bet.

The following table displays my prediction for each game compared to opening betting lines from various providers.

Results as of Week 4

How has the model performed to date?

The model predicts the probability that the home team will win and their expected margin of victory (or defeat). I assess the model’s performance by assessing the accuracy of its predictions (win/loss), the logloss of its probabilities, and the mean absolute error of the predicted margin.

The following plot shows my model’s predicted margin of victory vs the actual margin of victory for all games so far this season.

Season Model Results
season season_type games accuracy mn_log_loss mae
2024 regular 305 0.777 0.399 14.93

Model Results by Week
season season_type week games accuracy mn_log_loss mae
2024 regular 1 100 0.870 0.266 15.210
2024 regular 2 78 0.679 0.505 16.077
2024 regular 3 63 0.810 0.376 14.857
2024 regular 4 64 0.719 0.499 13.164

Previous Predictions

The following table displays the model’s predictions for previous weeks along with the actual result.

Against the Spread

How has the model performed against the spread? I compare my model’s predictions against betting lines from various providers.

season week .metric Bovada DraftKings ESPN Bet
2024 1 accuracy 0.535 0.535 0.506
2024 2 accuracy 0.521 0.510 0.436
2024 3 accuracy 0.462 0.519 0.460
2024 4 accuracy 0.556 0.541 0.531

The following table displays my model’s prediction in previous weeks against betting lines.

Upcoming Games

The following table displays predictions for all upcoming games based on the results of the season so far.